


A Virtuous Woman

by MercuryGray



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-17
Updated: 2016-09-17
Packaged: 2018-08-15 13:11:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8057722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: Sarah Livingston didn't ask to find a half-dead man outside her house. Sarah Livingston didn't ask for any of this. Is this, she wonders, the way God tests the virtuous? An exploration and expansion of a minor character's backstory.





	A Virtuous Woman

_ A virtuous woman who can find? Her value is beyond rubies. _  -Proverbs 31:10

 

* * *

  
  


_ Perhaps, _ Sarah Livingston thought,  _ the Lord is testing me.  _

 

_ Perhaps this is how Job felt when his crops failed and his children died, or when Moses heard God speaking out of the bush, telling him to do terrible, impossible things. Perhaps this is the voice in the temple crying to Samuel. _

 

_ But God, if you are so kind and merciful, why did you send me this? And why does your voice sound like punishment?  _

 

That was the conversation she had been having with herself for the last day, and this gift, this...singular occurrence over which she was agonizing, was one Reverend Benjamin Brewster, at the present moment lying quietly in her bed, his eyes closed --  either sleeping or resting, she could not tell which. Because this was not, to her mind, merciful, or just, or wise or any of the other hundred other words the ministers used when they spoke of God and his beneficent ways. 

 

This was cruel.

 

_ God, you made me a woman, and told me I should be kind, and generous, and loving, and I did as you asked, and you gave me increase with it! You gave me Mama, and Papa, and David and Henry and Abby, and you gave me William, God, and I was grateful! And you took William away from me, and I know I asked for him back, but not like this, God. Not like this. _

 

When she heard the branches break, out in the rain the night before, her first thought had been of blind panic, every fiber of her body on edge. More soldiers, come to take what little she had left? Her grain store was empty, her animals practically gone except for a few old chickens, her stocks of food all but exhausted. In the absence of better prizes, would they look past her barns to her house? Her bed? Her nearest neighbors were miles up the road, and if that was the case, there would be no one she could call for - or at least no one who would hear.

 

But after the panic came a strange calm, a kind of resolute anger that she’d found herself finding refuge in every time she tried to attempt a task that William would have done -- turning the field under, fixing a fence, going to check outside for the source of a strange noise. She felt it around her shoulders like a cloak:  _ I will not let this best me, too.  _

 

She’d been lucky the last time. She knew that, now. It had been a fine day when William had refused that officer, blue and perfect, with a bit of breeze. She remembered, also, a lot of horses on the track outside, frisking and whickering -- sounds that did not stand out to her at all until she she heard, coming up behind them, the stamp, stamp, stamp of a group of infantrymen, marching in ragged file.

 

William had been out in the yard, splitting rails for a fence, and she’d been making stew -- the same stew that she’d made last night, his favorite, with mutton from one of their sheep, butchered in the late fall, and parsley and thyme and marjoram, and onions and parsnips and carrots ready to add when the meat was finally tender. She’d only looked up when she heard him shout, not thinking anything of the sounds outside until she heard the shouting, the argument. 

 

She’d seen it all through the plate glass window on the front of the house. He’d pushed, and the officer had pushed back; he repeated the gesture, proud and angry, and then the lieutenant in his blue uniform raised the gun --

 

It was the loudest sound she’d ever heard. 

 

Louder than the bowl she dropped and shattered, or the scream she let loose, or the keening wail as she’d cradled him, in the yard, and watched his eyes go blank, the steady pulse of blood under her hand slowing, slowing, slowing, until it finally stopped, pooling under her hand.

 

And then the world had been silent, for a long, long time.

 

The neighbors came, helped lay him out, shroud him, whisper condolences. Jem Dawkins and the others dug the grave, under the pine trees where the sun wasn’t so hot, but there had been no service, no prayers. Just the men touching their hats and slinking home, afraid the rebels might come back and do the same to them for helping her.

 

For months she still laid a place for him at the table, leaving his clothes in the chest, folded as if he’d come back any day to wear them again. And time went on, seasons fading into one another. There was a new tone to her life, a break, like the scar left by a lighting strike down a tree, still living, but altered forever. Suddenly there was his work as well as hers, the animals to feed, the field to plow, the seed to sow. But there were no animals save her chickens, and no seed for the field -- the damned rebels had taken all of it. She’d no idea what she was going to do next year, or the year after. Who’d buy a half-improved farm? There were things a woman could do, and things a woman couldn’t -- couldn’t continue clearing around the house, as William had been planning to do, or split the rails for the fence. She’d never been asked to do such before. Wash, cook, butcher, milk, hatchell, spin, weave, sew, dry, preserve -- these were her words, her duties. But not the rest.

 

But as time passed, she found the resolve coming more and more often, as she looked at a thing and said  _ This needs doing, and I must be the one to do it. _

 

She’d split rails (though they weren’t as straight as William’s, or as neat) and moved what trees she could, plowed the field, split her own wood, kept the track outside the house clean. 

 

And when she heard the noise outside, she’d taken the rifle down from the wall, loaded and primed it, and was just about to go out when she remembered the rain.  _ Can’t very well go outside like this.  _ Hands full of the rifle, she grabbed, blindly, for the first thing on the pegs at the door, and it wasn’t her own cloak she laid hand on first, but William’s coat. His brown, worn-at-the-elbows workcoat -- the one she hadn’t found it in herself to move from its place at the door. She paused, feeling the garment under her fingers again.  Slipping her arms into almost felt like he was wrapping himself around her -- almost.  _ Well, if I die, at least I won’t be alone,  _ she thought.

 

She’d been expecting a live soldier -- and what she’d gotten was a half-dead minister. Not even a minister, when she’d found him, merely a man -- for he wore no collar, carried no bible or other sign of his work upon him, except for a large silver cross in his pocket. He hadn’t moved when she’d prodded him with the barrel of the rifle, nor made any sign of life other than a little groan when she’d turned him over, face ashen in the half-light of the moon. She remembered William’s face, cradled in her lap, his eyes fixed on hers as he, too, had turned pale and slack.

 

_ This man needs help. _ The thought came clearly to her.  _ But this man may be my enemy.  _ That thought was clear, too. The rain at her neck was cold, and the darkness made her more alert, ready to turn her gun on the next movement. William’s face hung in her memory, staring up at her with dead eyes.

 

_ Are you trying to test me, God?  _ It was a question and a prayer, rolled into one.

 

_ For the pangs of hunger were on me, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.”  _  And, after that, direct and cold as Pilate in his throne of judgement,  _ This man will die here if you do nothing, Sarah Livingston. _

 

William’s jacket was heavy with rain, and she swallowed, stiffened her shoulders under it.  _ This is a thing that needs doing, and I must be the one to do it. _

 

His shoulders were heavy under her hands, (how heavy William had been, when they’d wrapped him in his shroud!) his feet dragging through the leaves as she tried to move him back to the house. (They’d carried William, Jem Dawkins and Francis Haskell together.  One man at his shoulders and one at his feet, and she’d followed them, her hands sticky with blood. It had been one of them who’d closed his eyes, doubtless thinking it could have easily have been one of them.) 

 

There was no helping the mud his boots dragged across her floor, or the leaves caught in his coat, or the water that started soaking into her coverlet as she  hefted him into bed. (She hadn’t been strong enough, a year ago, with William, but she could not afford weakness now.) He was tall, and young, and as she moved him further into bed he groaned again, and she saw that her hand, pressed at his side, was reddening, a mix of blood and rain.

 

The wound in William’s chest had been a perfect circle, the skin around it burned by the powder, and this man, too, had a hole in his side, blood coursing angrily out of it. 

 

_ Are you trying to test me, God? _

 

Cuts she could manage, burns and breaks and rashes and all the rest, but there was little call in her life to learn what to do when a man pointed a gun at his fellow man. She’d seen a musket-ball wound only once before William, when, attending at Hannah Allen’s birth, the poor woman’s husband, nearly insensible after drinking through his wife’s long labor to console himself, had loosed off a shot in celebration and clipped Rob Simson’s arm.

 

The midwife had already had yarrow and marigold and comfrey steeping, and shepherd's purse and goldenseal and willow on the fire for tea, in case Hannah had taken a turn for the worse and bled too much.  After she probed the wound and determined that there was neither shirt nor broken bone in the wound,  they’d poulticed it and padded it liberally and bandaged it up. But that had been a graze, really, not a gaping hole in his side. 

 

And there was but one hole. The bullet was still inside -- and would have to come out, if she wanted any chance of saving him. Her fingers scrambled at the whole, fishing, probing -- nothing. He groaned, eyes still closed, and she cast around, desperately, for a sign, for an inspiration. Her fingers were too large, and not nearly long -- tongs! Or a pair of pliers? There were both in William’s workroom. Midwife Macdonald would have chastised her for the state of the tools -  _ but better the bullet out than in,  _ Sarah responded grimly.

 

She didn’t wish to remember that -- the layers of flesh, the struggle to pull the ball free. But she had managed. Bullet extracted, wound sewn shut, poulticed and bandaged as neat as she could manage, it seemed a minor miracle. And, sitting at his side, hands covered in blood, she looked down at his face, finally, and realized he was young -- far younger than she’d thought.  _ Somebody’s son. Somebody’s brother.  _

 

_ And if I had a brother, lost in a cold night and wounded, what would I want for him? “Whatever you did for the least of my brothers you did for me.” _

 

Her hand, still red with his blood, wrapped around his, and she felt his fingers answer back, a little, as if just remembering how to move. And she had prayed -- prayed as she had not been able to pray for William because she had not remembered the words.  “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:  And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

 

And from the bed, in the faintest voice, “Amen.” 

  
She found herself weeping in joy.

**Author's Note:**

> A while ago, after S3E4 aired and the fandom went berserk over Sarah Livingston and her (admittedly somewhat unlikely) relationship with Ben, a fellow tumblr user asked me to write something that might redeem Sarah, perhaps even to re-write the whole scene so the unnecessary romantic subplot could go quietly away and die where no one could see it. I started writing it, and never quite finished, since the scriptwriters determined Sarah needed to die just as much as the viewers thought the subplot did. 
> 
> Going through my WIP folder, I found this again, and decided it was worth sharing, at least the completed part.
> 
> So, in abbreviated form, an expansion, a backstory, an excuse, a redemption, of sorts, for Sarah Livingston.


End file.
